Archive for the 'Science and the Media' Category

I’m a huge fan of science fiction, especially hard science fiction, and also of scientific deconstructions of popular works of science fiction. I also enjoy other forms of speculative fiction – I don’t require scientific accuracy, or even plausibility, to enjoy a good book or movie. I’m perfectly willing to suspend disbelief or allow for “gimmies” – OK, there’s subspace and you can travel faster than light. I’m good with that. I appreciate, however, when sci fi writers try to work within the scientific framework as much as possible, to minimize “gimmies”, and to extrapolate thoughtfully from established science. What I am not tolerant of, however, is gratuitous errors in science. There’s just no excuse for that in science fiction.

I saw Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, Prometheus, over the weekend. What follows is a sequence of spoilers, so be warned. I will try not to discuss plot points unnecessarily, but if you don’t want any spoilers wait until after you see the movie to read further. This is also not going to be a movie review, just a discussion of some of the science in the movie.

Let me start with something that I really enjoyed. The planet that the ship Prometheus and its crew visit in the movie is actually a moon of a gas giant. I find this idea fascinating, and have speculated about this before myself. We are in the midst of an explosion of exoplanet discoveries. We are just now starting to get some data about what the typical configuration of other stellar systems is likely to be. We still don’t have enough data to answer this question, and our methods of finding exoplanets are biased toward large planets close to their suns. But we are starting to find smaller Earth-sized worlds far enough out to be in the goldilocks zone where liquid water can exist on the surface.

A new study, not published but to be presented at a meeting, purports to show that after the infamous Andrew Wakefield 1998 Lancet article alleging a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, vaccination rates in the US declined by about two percent. This may seem like a small amount but has an effect on public health, and vaccine refusal typically occurs in pockets that bring vaccination rates below the level needed for “herd” immunity, allowing for outbreaks.

This, however, is all old news. There are two other pieces of information in the study that are interesting. The first is that the decrease in vaccination rates did not rebound after Wakefield and his Lancet study were thoroughly refuted. That genie was out of the bottle, and correcting the misinformation did not have the desired effect of putting it back in. This too is in line with other research and experience. It is easier to spread fear than reassurance. Once rumors are spread the damage cannot be undone.

The study also purports to find that the there was an inverse relationship between education level and vaccine use – college-educated mothers were less likely to vaccinate their children. Further, in the 8 years after the Lancet study this gap increased. This education-gap is also in line with previous research, but needs some explanation. We need to distinguish unvaccinated from undervaccinated, and vaccine non-compliance from vaccine refusal. When looking at the undervaccinated, and specifically those who missed scheduled vaccines, this correlates with lower socioeconomic status and less education. This is in line with a more general pattern – the fewer resources a family has the less likely they are to avail themselves of available health care.

In a recent article in The Canadian, journalist Anthony Gucciardi trots out long discredited anti-vaccine canards in the guise of actual journalism. The piece is poorly researched and resourced, blatantly biased, and amounts to little more than irresponsible fear-mongering about the flu vaccine.

Gucciardi writes:

Each dose of flu vaccine contains around 25 micrograms of thimerosal, over 250 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety limit of exposure.

Mercury, a neurotoxin, is especially damaging to undeveloped brains. Considering that 25 micrograms of mercury is considered unsafe by the EPA for any human under 550 pounds, the devastating health effects of mercury on a developing fetus are truly concerning.

Everything Gucciardi wrote is either outright factually wrong, or incomplete in a way that makes it highly misleading.

Malaria is a serious illness in humans caused by several species of mosquito-born parasite (Plasmodium falciparum, vivax, and ovale). The CDC reports:

In 2008, an estimated 190 – 311 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide and 708,000 – 1,003,000 people died, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Efforts to reduce the incidence of malaria have largely focused on reducing the number of mosquitoes and preventing bites (for example by providing netting to cover beds), and these efforts can be very successful. But despite these measures malaria remains the 5th largest cause of death worldwide from infectious disease.

Final stage clinical trial data on RTS,S, also known as Mosquirix, showed it halved the risk of African children getting malaria, making it likely to become the world’s first successful vaccine against the deadly disease.

A common theme of this blog is that there is a great deal of misinformation out there. The internet is a double-edged sword, providing tremendous access to useful information, but increasingly buried in a mountain of bad, poorly sourced, and often just incorrect information. So the savvy internet user needs to develop the skills necessary to distinguish reliable information from misinformation.

Here is just the latest example – I was recently sent a link to this article on Discover Fit & Health – Stop Drinking Water With Meals–Seriously. The articles carries the “Discover” brand, and many readers might confuse this for an indicator of reliability. The author, Sara Novak , is described as:

…writes about health and wellness for Discovery Health. Her work is also regularly featured in Breathe Magazine and on SereneKitchen.com. She has written extensively on food policy, food politics, and food safety.

So she is not some anonymous blogger, nor does she appear to be selling dubious supplements or some multi-level marketing scheme. She is a health journalist writing for a health magazine. And yet she gives her readers this whopper:

It certainly is encouraging to see a health reporter doing some actual no-nonsense health reporting – trying to bring some perspective and meaningful science to the public. ABC News Health and Medical Editor Dr. Richard Besser did just that when he took Dr. Mehmet Oz to task over his recent reporting about arsenic in apple juice. On Good Morning America Besser did not pull any punches – he accused Oz of fear-mongering, irresponsible reporting, and using bad science to scare his audience. There was no false balance or weasel words, it was all very refreshing.

Just a decade ago hydrogen fuel cells were going to change our world. We were going to have an infrastructure to distribute hydrogen and fuel cells in our cars that are so efficient and environmentally clean that you could use them to power your home. So confident were the predictions of the “coming hydrogen economy” that car companies (like GM) banked on the technology, deciding to leap frog over hybrids. George Bush called for investment in the technology, and California’s govenator decided to get a head start on building the hydrogen infrastructure.

Now, a decade later, the hydrogen economy seems like just another false promise of future technology – like flying cars and jet packs. It turns out there were some non-trivial technical hurdles that needed to be overcome, and the assumption that they would easily or inevitably be solved was unjustified.

First, it needs to be recognized that hydrogen is not an energy or fuel source. There is negligible free hydrogen on the earth. That means that hydrogen has to be stripped from hydrocarbons or some other existing fuel, or hydrogen gas has to be made by putting the energy into it. So hydrogen is largely an energy storage system, not a source of energy.

The Human Genome Project (HGP)- the project to map the entire human genome – was one of the big public science endeavors that captured the imagination. It started in 1990 and took 13 years to complete, completing the map in 2003 (but certainly not ending the project). Unusually for most such big projects, it was completed ahead of schedule and below budget. The project benefited tremendously from improved techniques and advancing computer power. Sequencing the first genome took about 300 million dollars. Today we can do it for about 10,000 dollars, and the price continues to fall geometrically (about half every 9 months).

By all accounts the HGP was a huge success. But 8 years after the completion of the first human genome map there is the vague sense in the public that the promise has not been fulfilled. The public was promised that the HGP would allow us to identify genes associated with diseases, and then craft cures based upon that knowledge. So where are all the genetic cures we were promised?

What is really going on is that even a big-picture successful science project like the HGP can be overhyped by the press. By mapping the human genome scientists were given a powerful tool with which to investigate disease. It still takes, however, a tremendous amount of research to translate that tool into specific knowledge about an individual disease, and then further translate that specific knowledge into a proven treatment. The pipeline for translating the basic knowledge of the HGP into an actual treatment is about 15-20 years optimistically (and that is after a specific disease is pursued genetically.

Archaeopteryx lithographic is one of my favorite fossils. The Berlin specimen is practically a work of art. It is also a classic example of a transitional species, with a compelling blend of avian and dinosaur features. As much as it’s possible for a single fossil to be so, Archaeopteryx is a smoking gun of the evolution of birds from theropod dinosaurs.

It is also a much maligned fossil. Creationists have attacked it in every way imaginable, calling it a fraud, and ironically at times saying it’s just a dinosaur, and at others saying it’s just a bird.

But perhaps the most common misconception about the fossil, and about transitional fossils in general, is that their value as evidence for an evolutionary connection is dependent on their being a literal ancestor of the descendant group (in this case, birds). In other words, Archaeopteryx’s value as a transitional fossil is dependent on it being on the direct line that led to birds. This, however, is almost certainly not the case, and is also mostly irrelevant.

The Atlantic has also hosted an ongoing debate on the topic. Apparently at the Atlantic they feel that a fair debate is to have six prominent advocates on one side, along with the original author of the article, against a lone token skeptic on the other side (Steve Salzberg). Well, at least they are not revealing any bias. At the urging of Salzberg they did add a second token skeptic, David Colquhoun.

The debate, such as it is, at least reveals the current rhetorical tactics of the CAM proponents. They can be summarized largely as – we know that CAM modalities don’t work, but we’re nice and they will give you a good placebo effect. Plus science-based medicine isn’t perfect (shocker), so (false dichotomy) we offer an alternative. CAM proponents further try to take as much credit as they can for just good medical practice and some science based modalities, like nutrition, exercise, and good communication skills.